Caroline in the Deltahttp://caroline.teachforus.org
a Teach For America teacher's blogSat, 17 May 2014 18:49:32 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.1The end comes slowly all at once.http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/05/17/the-end-comes-slowly-all-at-once/
http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/05/17/the-end-comes-slowly-all-at-once/#commentsSat, 17 May 2014 18:45:57 +0000http://caroline.teachforus.org/?p=11213Community Bakery is on the corner of 12th and Main, in the SoMa neighborhood of Little Rock. I’m sitting at the tiny rocky table right next to the soda fridge, mostly finished with my tomato soup in a bread bowl. I have two pigtails approximately 12 inches long in a white paper bag in the backseat of my car. I interviewed for the job I already am employed in– but for the full time position this time, the one that includes travel, that takes me from the classroom, that I could move to Little Rock for. I looked at two apartments this morning and don’t think I’ll look at any more. If I get the ATC official offer by Wednesday night, Thursday morning my deposit will be down on the first apartment I looked at.

I’m ready.

One of my students is texting me right now– video after video of performances from the talent show that happened in our school gym yesterday. Our superintendent showed up in the beginning, hovering near the black-butcher paper covered front doors. My former principal took a seat in the front row. My students operated the spotlights, took photos, behaved beautifully, and all around had an excellent show. Our third annual, very likely the last the school will have for a while or ever– no one too interested in stepping up to take over.

I have two days left with students, both of which half or all of the kids will get checked out early, leaving with their parents to get their hair or nails done for promotion, driving to Pine Bluff to buy new outfits and shoes. On Wednesday they’ll all walk delicately across the carpeted gym floor, taking their certificates and going home to cook-outs and pool parties. Newly crowned seventh graders.

I’ll take a day or two or three to pack up my room, and use the rest of my sick days to pack my Dumas house and work for ATC.

My Dumas life is ending.

I want to feel like crying about it, but I don’t. I’ve been preparing for months, my brain switching from Dumas to Little Rock to Dumas with each weekend, my eyes trained on studying my students’ faces, my brain desensitized to Q being in perpetual in-school suspension, to another of my favorites getting taken from the school by a police officer seconds after I gave him a hug and told him I loved him– I know I will spend many days broken hearted and remembering, full of their tiny hands and huge ideas, full of their enthusiasm and their distance from me… but right now I’m too close for it to hit completely. I’ve learned from myself that grief takes time to set in with me, it comes far after the absence.

I sat in a black chair at the salon yesterday, watching these long rat-tails clipped at my neck. Watching the razor scissors giving volume and texture and shaping this little bob. Watching the hair dryer in sections, curl under here, smooth here. Then I looked up and caught my breath right at the top of my throat, glanced up then down, realized how hard it might be to text a picture of my new hair to Auntie– I look just like my mother.

This might be a last post on teachforus. New hair, new city, new job, and the 691 spam comments that appeared in the past month unchecked are putting me a little over the edge. I love teachforus; it’s been my blogging home for four years… but like much else it’s becoming defunct and too small, ill maintained, saturated with yesterday.

Caroline in the Delta: now slowly moving out.

Perhaps there will be an ATC blog on the horizon? Perhaps a new writing adventure? I’ll be sure to post any professional updates, but for now I’ll just leave you with love. Love for the history cataloged in this intangible place, love for the hundreds of tiny bodies I stood in front of for so many hours in the past four years, love for the life Teach For America has shaped, and love for the universe.

This is not the light at the end of a tunnel, this is a dance through a field between long and rugged paths.

I have work to do. I have four and a half more weeks of lessons to plan, training to design, partnerships to build, calls to make, assignments to spit out and post up on Blackboard. I’m not finished with anything except one of three current grad classes (four or five more on the horizon for the summer), but I have so much relief.

My heart is bloated with calm, with a peaceful kind of carbonation. My chin is level, my eyes open.

Driving to Little Rock today my eyes just poured over. One time, two times, three. I am in an active transition. Today I submitted my official application for the full time ATC position (my first ever CV!) and I cherish every day I have with my students. I take more time to ask them how they are, to ask how they’ll be when they move into the next grade, next school, next set of teachers. I talk about my move to Little Rock as a fact, I try to help orchestrate new people to take over my rent. My relationships are changing; growing or muting or a newly drifting satellite.

Last night JL and I watched a romantic comedy called About Time. It’s cute and human and was a good filler for a lazy Thursday night. The father in it is diagnosed and dies from cancer. This, combined with the hour and a half drive to get here, compelled me to tears today. Mom. Mom, mom, mom, mommommom– if she was here I would tell her everything. I would ask for advice and let her be proud and tell her that no, I’m not leaving Arkansas. These transition times are the hardest to be motherless, but it never warrants complaint, just recognition. My kids show me daily how much I’ve been given in my life, despite what’s been taken away.

These posts get smaller and smaller, my students stories get fewer and fewer. My brain, my heart, in transition. I love it. I love all of it, but it’s getting closer and closer to far away.

]]>http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/04/18/kick-push-kick-push-coast/feed/0THE DAY OF TESTINGhttp://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/04/08/the-day-of-testing/
http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/04/08/the-day-of-testing/#commentsTue, 08 Apr 2014 02:23:49 +0000http://caroline.teachforus.org/?p=11205The tests have arrived. In perfectly aligned little rows, five rows of five, they test. They test and test and test. Not one, but four reading passages: eight multiple choice, one open response. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Why the choice is made to put ALL FOUR reading tests on one day and ALL FOUR math tests on the next day is beyond me.

All of this: beyond me.

And for some reason I decided it was logical to arrive with the old adage, “When thou state tests, thou plays movies during all other time,” which in fact is the worst idea anyone has ever come up with because the last thing 25 tested-to-death sixth graders want to do is sit quietly and watch a movie. Even if they did nap for all those final 5 minutes of every single test, they really just want to run around a scream.

So we played jeopardy instead. I only wrote up one child for losing the cap to an Expo marker. (Yes, the incident was bigger and more elaborate than that, but the bottom line truly was the cap of an Expo marker– those are expensive!)

The real blessing to my heart was after school, when the third and fourth and eighth graders arrived promptly at 3:25, even a parent coming to do the accompaniment for a rather difficult church song well executed by a fourth grader. Our first talent show rehearsal. The eighth graders did an excellent job of mentoring the younger kids, all of them pairing up to help: one sitting with the clump of hosts, helping them write their introductions to all the acts; one helping a gorgeous gospel singer hit her notes with a richer sound; me sitting with the nae nae girls, telling them to repeat this one part over and over until they’re all throwing their hips in the same direction at the same time, smiles wide and those side conversations stopped.

It was glory, pure glory.

And let me reiterate that a parent arrived to help with guitar player for his daughter; the third year running and I’m always in awe. Their whole family warms my entire sloppy heart, with how kind and proactive and visible they are. I wish I could teach their daughter, but I likely won’t be here by then.

Speaking of, ATC is on a roll. We had our final PD event on Saturday, and overall success but something I can’t quite talk about with getting personally offended due to items that were not personal in natural at all. I feel like a minor failure, but shouldn’t, and I recognize that but also still own the failure bit. The job description is coming, always coming, and one day soon I’ll actually apply to the job I’m already working.

Starting with a moderately psychotic spurt of “going out” in the traditional way us 20-somethings do, trotting through our favorite haunts of Little Rock, meeting musicians and democrats and people with overlapping professional circles. I was screaming out liberty, no longer tied to anything, free from the omnipresent fishbowl effect of small town living. I moved myself into KP’s apartment, even cutting my bangs back to look like her (wink), finally reading and finishing Gone Girl (good, okay. as obsessively excellent as I was lead to believe, no. Doesn’t that always happen?), walking her pup down past the golf course on the River Trail and to the tiny dog park on the other edge of the apartment complex.

I social-media’d myself to death, holed up on the couch or my bed or KP’s bed, listening to either the Forest Sun or Macklemore Pandora stations, depending on time of day. Worked two full days on ATC documents that have been looming, and managed to get back to Dumas for two nights to endure the most pleasant root canal that can possibly be had (primarily due to incredibly nice dentist/hygienist and the GOD GIVEN RM, who nursed me with funny stories, zero judgement for my 7 hour nap, and pure JOY).

Today is the last day of spring break, so I forced myself out of bed somewhere near 7:50am. Chanting to myself, get to the coffee shop by 9. Get there by 9 and immediately start working or you will feel guilty all day. So I arrived by 9:30 and started the easiest and most straight-forward task: grading.

It was a good choice.

As I shuffle through assignments (after an hour I’m done grading a quiz and reading logs, about to move onto the timed essays that they’re so anxious to know their scores on), I find myself giggling at how natural it’s become for us to talk about books and reading. They are genuinely pumped about their independent reading (if nothing else in class), and there’s no longer any kind of hesitation or stigma around it. I am so proud of my nuggets (thnx, RM) and writing tiny notes back on their reading logs is exactly the motivation and joy I need to get ready to see them all again, to conquer the last 7.5 weeks of teaching, and potentially the final 7.5 weeks of my teaching career.

Exhibit A, from a student who entered my class just two weeks ago, who literally refused to read for the first full week:

At first I didn’t like reading at all anymore. Since I’ve been in Ms. Lampinen’s class she introduced me to Captain Underpants books I’ve read three in five days they’re very exciting, funny, and goofy. I love the flip-o-rama pages they’re really good books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid from now on I will read both of these books.

Exhibit B, from the girl who wrote a poem about being behind in and disliking reading all of last year, who currently has the most AR points of any student in the sixth grade:

Dear Ms. Lampinen,

I’m basically done with this book now. I’m on the second to last page of the epilogue and this book is the most epic book ever with all the surprising things that happen. I can visualize this book so well that sometimes I don’t even realize it. This book is worth 20 points and it’s on a 7.0 level and I don’t think I’ll make it to a 10.0 at the end of the year. By the way I spent a lot of time on that book.

Exhibit C, who meandered who way through reading-but-not-reading the entire first half of the year, staring into space instead of turning pages:

Dear Ms. Lampinen,

I was reading the book Buddy. It’s a really good book. That’s probably been the best book I’ve read this year. I want to thank you for being a really nice and good teacher. Love, M

And scattered within these were lots of competitive kids, wanting to beat the number of points another kids, wanting to personal best themselves, trying to finish the entire Bluford Series (thank God for Townsend Press), summarizing books on books on books. Though their are tons of things I’m not proud of this year, one thing I always fall back on to boost myself up is the genuine enthusiasm my kids have for independent reading (even if it is sometimes motivated by points, even if it is sometimes a year or two below their level, even if it is simply eight books in the same series back to back to back I think it’s totally worth it).

My favorite thing is when I’m taking attendance and lunch count in the morning and kids are getting just a little too chatty; I look up to calm them and notice that literally half the class is leaned over on a friend’s desk, turning the pages and talking about a book.

]]>http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/03/30/books-and-break/feed/0Starting Springhttp://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/03/16/starting-spring/
http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/03/16/starting-spring/#commentsSun, 16 Mar 2014 23:50:52 +0000http://caroline.teachforus.org/?p=11194I’m having a hard time doing most things. Instead of facing all the work I have for ATC, or planning for the mere two weeks I have before our state test arrives, or running the nine miles I had slated for today, or anything else that I know I should and could be doing… I read. I read and I clean my room.

My head and heart are caught. Caught between preparing for the too-soon future of a potential new job (which isn’t even posted yet, which I haven’t applied to, which I don’t have), new city, new life and focusing on enjoying the present. I don’t want to either.

I don’t want to prepare for talent show auditions tomorrow. I don’t want to get ahead in my grad school work (or caught up, depending on how you look at it). I don’t want to move forward in the work for ATC. I don’t want to plan my unit. I don’t want to connect with old or new or current friends. I don’t want to do anything.

I’ve been caught and hating thinking about why this is. Why am I completely adverse to moving forward? Why am I shuddering at the thought of facing the now with determination and the future with hope? Why did I come home from school and immediately crawl into three hour naps two days this week? Why did my nine mile run turn into two mile elliptical, two mile jog

I’m depressed but not.

My heart is ripped in half for the losses I don’t want to claim, for the knowledge of how petty they are compared to all the stories I know. I ache daily for the growing number of former students who have, euphemistically, “gotten into trouble” since I’ve taught them three years ago. For the old, worn in house I’ve lived in for four years (and haven’t moved from yet, Caroline!!) For the energetic mom who will not be here for yet another major transition in my life. For the Delta-moved-big-city boy who is an inconsistent constant returning to the background yet again. For the Round Two Dumas Family who will disperse and fade, just as the first family did. For all the students I wake up to every Monday morning, for the fact that they will grow and learn and change and become humans that I will not know, that I have no right knowing after May of this year.

My little heart is rocking back and forth daily, a gentle spring sway with the sounds and smells of a new season. Outside, breathing deep and developing the skeleton of projects I won’t finish or start. Inside, humbled by the journals I skim through from 2012, 2010, 2008, holding all my tiny thoughts and tiny changes and tiny relationships I’ve had.

Spring break is in five teaching days, after which will be the last long stretch of Dumas teaching that I will face for what I expect to be a while. Every day I look at all the tiny faces open, eager, bursting as they peer at me, expecting. I look at them and want to slump for lack of planning, lack of drive, lack of commitment in my own flesh. I look at them and want to rise like bread dough in an oven, filling up my classroom, pressing soft against them all, holding them close. I want to be their parent, their sister, their aunt, their friend. It’s only with the end in sight that the road looks so short behind. It’s only walking away that the true, deep disappointment can have a real excuse to show up.

The end is coming. What do I have to show? So many things. So much love. So many people. But with the end of this school year I feel like I can take little trinkets out of my chest: this item a dense figure of fear, this warm vibrant messy love, this dry crumbling piece of stubbornness, these fragile pages of memories, and this wide rolling blanket of a Delta life.

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.

Sitting in the immaculate Jacksonville Lighthouse cafeteria, I flipped through the tiny notebook I had brought with me for notes, the cover bright blue with “!!!” in silver on the front. My attitude did not match my notebook. I found a page from our second in person PD for ATC. In it was this quote by Anthony Robbins, a person I’ve only known since I googled him five minutes ago. Perhaps I’m in love.

The past two or three weeks have been riddled with poor personal decisions, rationalized with productive, important work. These decisions largely aren’t inhibiting me from doing the things I’ve been doing: grad school, teaching, ATC. I function. I wake up each morning. I breathe, I talk, I eat most of the time. Yet, I repeatedly find myself standing very literally in the middle of a bad decision, reprimanding myself for that decision as I complete it. The climax was this past Monday, a day most Arkansan schools had off because of excessive ice. We didn’t. At 6:30am, I decided to give it to myself regardless.

I’m sick. Not throwing up, not coughing or feverish or covered in a rash. But I am sick. I shook for half the day, literally ran from room to room, literally jumping, toes off the ground, repeatedly. Anxiety rocketed me from one end of the house to the other– not doing any of the work I thought I could complete as a result of not being at school. I was afraid to leave the house, sick enough to not go to school but not sick enough to stay home? I sat at my computer for hours, talked to myself through half a pack of Trefoils.

It wasn’t until the next morning, as I talked to Britney and contemplated what, exactly, I did on Monday that I managed to spit out, “I was depressed and anxious and couldn’t come.”

It was the truth.

My conclusion may be that I am on a long, slow road of transition. On Wednesday, when I began implementing the investment and management strategy that my classes and I created together, I included the bribe of: Can I tell all of you a secret? A sad, sad secret? Only two other people at school know.

Students stop, stare. Wait.

I love all of you so, so much. I love Dumas and this school and I love teaching. But there is a chance that–

Students glance at one another, look back to me

– that I won’t be here next year. That I might not be teaching at all.

I know most of my students are not surprised, though some emit small gasps. Some eyebrows furrow. Some look out the window as if I’ve said nothing.

If I can admit it to my kids, even without another official job offer, even without admitting it to myself, even without knowing this is right… I’m the type of person that doesn’t believe anything about myself until someone else tells me. Until I’m already staring at packed boxes, until I’ve already been doing what I said I wasn’t sure I’d do. People ask if I’m staying in Dumas next year and I still say, eagerly, “There’s a chance! I love it there! I love everything, and nothing is confirmed.”

And my heart is still in some disbelief that I’ve ever lived here at all. That I’ve lead any sort of Dumas existence even remotely bigger than a mosquito.

Today I drove back from Little Rock at 9am, shocked. Shocked that I left Little Rock that early, shocked at the visceral response my body has to being in a different community, shocked that I may have owned up to even 0.00004% of the feeling that maybe somewhere in my pores I want to leave. Shocked that I have the opportunity. Shocked I might take it.

I am terrified of the transition time, of having a defunct corps member blog, of losing the chance to see a room full of faces every morning at 8am, of losing the home I’ve had for four years, of leaving the absolute comfort of my classroom, of entering a world I actively denounced, actively hid from since college. The levels of transition anxiety are richer than I expected, are more real than I’d like to own. Everyone wants to be the person that can walk away without strings; everyone wants to be the person that grows alongside their students, still there when they return adults themselves. I cannot be either of these things.

I don’t want to walk away. I don’t want to leave. But as much disbelief I have in leaving, I have in feeling I can stay.

]]>http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/03/10/disbelief/feed/1Terrified/Totalled/Trumpedhttp://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/03/01/terrifiedtotalledtrumped/
http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/03/01/terrifiedtotalledtrumped/#commentsSat, 01 Mar 2014 22:01:06 +0000http://caroline.teachforus.org/?p=11184March came! January and February took their days; January cold and dark, six o’clock bringing deep, quiet naps under three comforters; February days braced against the cold, chin to the sun, even a day or two above 60 degrees.

I’m not sure I had any weekends off between Christmas break and the middle of February, the last three weekends being our third ATC PD event, running my first full marathon, and then spending a longer than anticipated weekend snowed into Chicago, cuddling and cooing at three week old Vera and talking to her mama, my best friend from college.

Then last weekend hit, a pit of time I didn’t expect, quiet and serene in Dumas. I didn’t go anywhere except the nearest Walmart in Monticello, and to the Huddle House diner with my favorite Britney. This weekend was slated to be the same but unexpectedly picked me up and put me in Little Rock. Where I tend to be, where my friends are, where I might end up.

My stomach is bubbling, my fingers shake in the mornings. After such a huge physically accomplishment, I haven’t ran a single step since. Instead I take trip after trip to sit at the picnic table in my backyard, pink striped slippers shuffling on the dirt pebble mixture we have instead of grass. I’ve stared at our blue plastic kiddie pool for probably hours at this point, watching the rain water fall, then sit, then freeze, then thaw again. I’ve been noticing the stars on clear nights and the haze in the mornings.

My classroom has been running itself. After assigning a fairly demanding rubric-oriented Black History Month project my students have been tearing through google drive, creating documents and presentations and letters for their penpals. They’ve earned increasing responsibility and trust, taking ownership over getting the laptops, helping one another with grammar and meeting expectations, and taking ownership over our incredibly outdated mobile glad. These two weeks I’ve been pretty glad I’m the only teacher who consistently uses it; there’s never competition for time.

My social life has dwindled under the timesuck of 14 interviews for our four ATC summer positions. I worked 28 documented hours in the past two weeks on top of Dumas work and grad school. The running end has significantly helped make that possible, but has simultaneously drained seemingly all energy I have for spare moments. Between interviews I found myself dazing, staring at the balls of cotton stuck in a red tin on a wooden shelf I have hung on the wall opposite my dining room table. I’d twist my grandmother’s engagement ring around and around, then take it off and place it carefully centered on the gray top of my Diet Coke bottle. Ask about strengths and weaknesses, ask about future potential in Arkansas.

I love my jobs completely, both of them. Going to school, even when Q’s eyes glaze and he slumps, even when Kay puts the devilish cartoony sly grin on, even when K comes in smelling of urine, I love teaching. I love teaching. The size to which my chest expands when I look out at their young faces, all facing me, all in anticipation, all contemplating their lives and their places and the decisions they have made or are yet to make… every day it overwhelms me. Every day I am so in love.

And ATC, I can’t even begin. All of the applicants so excited about a program not in competition with, but as a complement to, Teach For America. Everyone so excited about the possibility of a program that pushes teacher retention beyond the two year TFA expectation. The passion in their voices, the strength of their own classroom experiences, the powerful potential they have as a united team… again it’s overwhelming. To think that I’m capable or deserving to build a team like this, to be responsible for anyone’s development– I don’t feel qualified but I also feel there’s no other direction to go in.

My brain and my heart. This has not been a hard week, this has not been exhausting. I know what those feel like and this is not it. And yet I feel collapsed. I feel crushed and I feel insecure and I feel weak. My aunt called recently to see if I was okay, to check and see what my life is, what my days are. At the end she said in an attempt to show concern but what came out as flippant: “and I know you hide your emotions, so–” quickly pushing into the next sentence.

I don’t think I actively hide them. I think I often don’t see them there, so all encompassing and so pervasive in everything I’m doing that I just can’t seem to pin them down. And then when I do, when I catch myself sobbing to a little boy showing courage or glazing over while I star into a startlingly clear kiddie pool of water, I’m so embarrassed. I’m so full of a feeling of internal I told you so, of you should’ve known better, that it seems impossible to acknowledge that beyond the outpouring of love I feel crumbled. I feel neglected and silly and frail.

The solution is calm, is social plans and momentum and trust. The solution is running this 10k with Hannah even though I haven’t ran in three weeks and my lungs feel like forest fires. It’s getting a hotel with Rachel and sleeping in a king bed, it’s getting breakfast and talking for two hours about the state of the world. The solution is moving forward even when you want to stop. It’s continuing to work when you feel spent, it’s feigning confidence when insecurity is planning a coup. It’s ignoring terrified and talking love. Most of all it’s watching Alex Boye and Lexi Walker as close to 500 times as possible and learning from them and Elsa to just let it go.

]]>http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/03/01/terrifiedtotalledtrumped/feed/0Stopped.http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/01/28/stopped/
http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/01/28/stopped/#commentsTue, 28 Jan 2014 23:31:27 +0000http://caroline.teachforus.org/?p=11180For the first time in Caroline history, I solved a problem by not running.

There are two personal constants I’ve had since seventh grade that I swear by: running and writing. I know in my deep little flickering soul that these two things are the core of my stability, my well-being, my clarification and my passion. But these two things also provide a tangible escape from reality: running to avoid lesson planning, writing to avoid talking out a problem.

Yesterday, I stopped.

I’ve been training for a marathon on a crunch schedule, upping my long runs by two miles each week, my latest max being 18. On Sunday I was set to run 20.

Set to run 20 with a series of overdue grad assignments, with classroom planning that’s been behind since before Christmas, with a relationship strained from my lack of being present, with a Saturday Event for 20 first year teachers needing organization and attention. Twenty miles, 3.5 hours. So I stopped. I breathed. I prioritized.

I warned my totally wonderful southern counterpart that this year would be busy. That I had my priorities straight: work, running, second job, grad school, then relationship. Last year I jeopardized my sanity by not setting that straight on day one, and I’ve been determined to not let it happen again. But by doing that, and sticking to it remarkably well, my relationship hardly existed. My ability to do something unplanned, unexpected, not listed out with the potential for a satisfying line to be struck through it at the end of the day… it ceased to exist. I need to stop.

In college I did an exhibition called I Can’t Stop. It took up an entire gallery space, a rather large one, full of displays, color-copied journal entries, and artifacts from all the times I was propelled by ambition, by travel, by an insatiable appetite. For the first time in a long time I have this new, beautiful feeling of being full. Of biting off more than I can chew. Of needing time to digest.

So Sunday I stopped. While my other half rode my tiny bike, I trotted a comfortable 7.5 miles, a third of what I planned. I stayed in bed until two. I breathed and wrote my dad a letter and went to be early enough to wake up at five and get planned for the week. I came home from school Monday with a dead set “not going to run today” and immediately did 2.5 hours of grad school work, followed by 2.5 hours of second job work. I felt the boulders roll of my back one my one as my life got more in order and my building tasks were finished. Finally: breath. Finally: rest.

I walked into school today feeling comfortable. I laughed in class, I told my students personal stories for the first time in months, I listened to them list off the events they did last night, and I accepted a letter from Q apologizing for his disruptive recent behavior. A letter that listed the reasons why he asked his mom to request me for his teacher this year. My heart melted and I smiled. My students smiled, too.

My homeroom, two students in which have openly gay pen-pals, the class that knows I was in their wedding, the class that watched a movie about a hypothetical “heterophobic” world for their Christmas party– they watched the Macklemore performance on the Grammies for their first activity today. After I had four questions posted:

Social Studies lesson of the day:

If this is the major performance of the event, what can we assume the Grammies’ position on same-sex marriage is?

What do you think the message from this performance is?

Right now, 17 states allow same-sex marriage. Predict what will happen with same-sex marriage in the next 40 years. Where do you think Arkansas will stand legally? Why?

What do you believe about same-sex marriage? How should you act to both respect your own opinion and respect the opinion of others?

Being very careful and very explicit in communicating that they do not need to agree with the Grammies, but must understand they are witnessing the writing of history, my students engaged in discussion about what this means for America, what this means for Arkansas, and what this means for them. I heard so many comments about students who “wouldn’t care, would be friends with anyone” and students who “would leave them alone and be who they want to be, even if I don’t agree with it”. Afterward, I applauded their maturity and their willingness to be open with their opinions, especially the students who admitted that they definitely do not support gay marriage.

In my second class, as I graded homework and danced about the classroom, I knew stopping what just what I need to do when a student casually asked, “Ms. L, did you have a good morning?”

“I did! Why?”

“I can tell.”

Exhale. They can tell. They are resilient. I am resilient. They can tell. I can tell, too. Sometimes to get running again all I’ve got to do is stop.

]]>http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/01/28/stopped/feed/0Arkansas Winterhttp://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/01/16/arkansas-winter/
http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/01/16/arkansas-winter/#commentsThu, 16 Jan 2014 23:13:48 +0000http://caroline.teachforus.org/?p=11177I have a lot of work to do.

“First, your head. Hold it up without any help. Hands and fists down, you must look without help.” Limp wrists curled against necks, little baby bird wings, flightless under tight jaws.

“Down.”

Slowly arms uncurled, pressed tight against ribcages or resting in fists on the desks.

“Now your feet. Go directly. Under. Desks.” Little movement. “Not to the side, not one in one out, both feet, under, desks.” Jordans and Walmart sneakers slid into place.

“Decide what I mean when I say this, and do it. Square. Up.” Instinctively, every student faced into their new five-person pod. Eyes quickly darting up, across from them at a new face. Someone they didn’t spend the last nine weeks up. Just as quick the eyes averted.

“Now last, the hardest part.” They were tense, waiting. “There is a pole, going straight through the top of your head and into your bottom. Your spine must be straight.”Backs pressed against the blue or maroon plastic of their worn out desks, lanky arms draped across the surface.

“This is how we will read. Every. Day. Full group, and in pods. When we do great, you will be allowed to independently read in whatever position you want, wherever you want in the room. But we must earn it.”

Today my room was icy with them, all the students so stubborn with their brand new copies of Number the Stars, a book they seemed to despise before opening the first page. They were raging when I didn’t directly answer raised hands, when I reflected questions and refused conversations. They were stiff and unfeeling when we read the first six pages as a class.

But they read. Their posture corrected as I walked by or as I interjected a sentence with, “Pause. Check your head.”

These students are capable, laughing, smart. They have infectious smiles and quick fingers, constantly twisting rubber bands into new bracelets, coloring graph paper in patterns. They take pride in their clothes, their work, their relationships and pens and homework grades. They are human.

When I started planning for Number the Stars my brain housed collision after collision of gradiose ideas: tie it in to bullying, and do a class project for the school; tie it in to Black History Month and historical figures that showed courage; show how color and ethnic and preference lines blur when we all recognize that we are human.

But this week started. Monday, after a long weekend of a grad school seminar I was late to (again) and a sixteen mile run that left me full of pride and whimpering at dusk in Murry Park, walking off my tense shoulders on Little Rock’s River Trail. The week started after I missed a call with an important resource for planning the Arkansas Teacher Corps’ summer institute, a job that is daunting and enticing when I can commit a straight two hours to attempting to plan. It started after allowing myself three straight hours of social time (after grad school, after a five mile run on Saturday) with frozen yogurt and homemade pizza; skipping a movie to go to sleep early on a red couch, preparing for the sixteen miles.

The week started and I didn’t feel prepared. I didn’t feel committed or excited about the tasks I was attempting to complete. The week started, and the paralysis of over-thinking turned into avoiding planning entirely, turned into lacking procedures, content, and delivery, turned into all of us hating this fourth grade level book that I had so much hope in.

I think by attempting a unit on bullying, I am bullying my students into taking this class more seriously. After having reading conferences last week, realizing that the vast majority of students are reading books on second, third, and fourth grade levels because they are comfortable, I am frantically trying to correct the error of prioritizing a tolerance for reading over a high level critical knowledge of reading. I am backtracking and overcompensating for not re-training reading procedures after our last three weeks of writing pen-pal letters, taking TLI tests that aren’t aligned to how I teach, and having time in class to complete homework packet after homework packet.

I am drowning in reality. In knowing that there is no halfway point Christmas break; we are past it. There is no promise of next year; this could be my last year as a classroom teacher. There is no way to perfectly put each tiny mind in a special mold of academic dreams and the intrinsic desire to not get pregnant before graduation. I am more than halfway finished with the year; I am infinitely behind in my work.

This morning I read off the names of each of my homeroom students at our nine weeks awards ceremony. Of my class, one single student did not earn an award. One student got her first citizenship (no discipline for nine weeks) award ever. Three had all A honor roll. I have never given out the number of awards I did today. I had so much pride as I read them out, so much love when I watched them shake our assistant principal’s hand. But as a handful of them got checked out, as tradition tells a select group to do each term, it disappeared when the stubborn remainder of my class came back to the room. Glum, angry, slouching.

When I got home from school I made a mug of tea and pulled out Fire from the Rock by Sharon Draper, a book I’ve been reading during the 15 minutes of silent reading my students have each day in class. When I left off reading it this afternoon the protagonist was frustrated and worn out from responsibilities pulling her in too many directions at once: she’s being recommended to integrate Central High in 1957. This is my third book on the topic (after Melba Pattillo’s Warriors Don’t Cry and Kristin Levine’s The Lions of Little Rock) and after hating the first 30 pages I’m now deeply committed and concerned for the entire family of well-developed characters. I read with anger at what the Little Rock Nine went through and what my current students continue to go through.

I’m angry that people are homophobic, that race is an issue I can see in the actions of my students, that I have 26 grad school assignments left to do and that I haven’t pressed myself enough to effectively plan for Number the Stars. I’m angry that the second season of Girls is to authentically dark, that I’m not sure where I’ll live or what my job will be after August, and that my sister is not in this state and my mother is not on this earth to give me advice or to see every day.

I was reading this book on my back porch, drinking the tea and sitting in the lime green fleece Katie gave me last year after shrinking it post-camping. Angry at my day, at my life, at the eight miles I have scheduled today and the 22 my Nike+ is telling me I’m supposed to run tomorrow. I’m angry, but pitifully so.

My grad school director and mentor building principal sat in a conference room with me to talk about my internship today. The director drove over two hours to get there, and the principal took time out of caring for his daughter who’s been sick (him missing school all week) to meet with me. For me. To help prepare me to be an administrator. These men and I sat around a rectangular table, looking at spreadsheets of intern projects and talking about the expectations for each one. Deciding when to do them, who will help me with them, and the resources I need to finish the program. I was pulled out of class to do this.

I do not have a right to be dissatisfied. I have not the tiniest bit of room to complain. I cannot take any more breaths of frustration when in front of me I’ve walked into, built, and shared a system of support that is deeply rooted and completely optimistic. My angry students came back from their afternoons to prepare for buses begging me to grade the homework they finished early. My highest achieving student immediately was on a chair, erasing the date and schedule off the board to prepare me for tomorrow. The perfect neighbor-teacher and quick best friend sat with me in the hall (because after helping my struggle student complete his homework for tomorrow literally in the doorway before he left for the bus, I couldn’t manage to stand up again without encouragement) to decompress our day, and my homeroom’s what we call “grump grump attitudes.”

I was part of a beautiful same-sex union in a church in downtown Little Rock on New Years Eve. I spent the better part of my break with a delta gentleman who I am steadily attached to. One of my students left me a note on my desk before getting checked out that included, “I never want to leave your class because you are a very good teacher! One of the BEST teachers I have ever had.” My second class killed an assignment to revise for style, working entirely on the iPads we’ve had in the room for four days.

This season is always the hardest for me (for most?) I’m so used to preaching to first year teachers that once those October and November days are over, things go up and up. But those months were wonderful in 2013 and 2012– it’s the post-Christmas laziness, the high pressure test looming, and the anxiety and guilt that coat any thoughts of not being here next year, this is the season for those things. And the cold.

My weekends until late February are booked. New Orleans tomorrow, managing a PD day for new teachers, running a marathon, spending time with the beau, a flight to meet a baby in Chicago. My life is full of celebration, support, love. I am proud, I am happy, I am blessed with the opportunity challenge brings and the strength it nurtures to grow. 2014 is both nothing and everything I’ve expected.

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http://caroline.teachforus.org/2014/01/03/home-2/#commentsFri, 03 Jan 2014 20:41:24 +0000http://caroline.teachforus.org/?p=11171Before the holiday break, my students wrote to a TLI (test prep program used across Arkansas) prompt. It was their summative expository writing essay test:

There are many places we might feel “at home.” Your teacher has asked you to describe the place where you feel most at home.

Before you begin to write, think about the place where you feel most at home. Where is this place? What is it like? Describe it so your teacher can understand.

Before the test, we did a three-day crash course in essay organization. Pre-writing to have the solid, formulaic, five paragraph essay. The writers of the world shall cry, woe to those teachers who write to formulas! Woe to those students who have creativity stunted! Yes, I understand, I know the evil of prescriptive writing. I also know that understanding a five paragraph essay, out of the box as it is, will ultimately bring more generic academic success to a greater number of students than allowing free-form creative writing for all assignments. It’s a fine balance for us literacy teachers, isn’t it? I just hope that doing the Poet Warriors project later in the year will counteract any formula damage I’ve created so far.

So my students sat for 45 minutes, some done in 10, some taking the extra 45 seconds it took to collect the papers to furiously scribble a closing. Some students vomited out three scrawled paragraphs of decreasing length, but the majority have one page of carefully calculated pre-writing, and a page and a half of formula writing. Here is the place. These are three reasons. Let me remind you of this place.

I took a solid two weeks off from thinking about school even a little bit. I hid from my email app on my phone. I spent 12 hour stretches alone in the car, thinking of my own life, thinking of my career goals and opportunities, thinking of myself without the attachment of children. Maybe this is the product of TFA’s short term commitment. Maybe I am one to be persecuted for selfishness in planning to stay only four years, for not being a life-long teacher even though I could be, for potentially walking away.

Yesterday I began the slow crawl back to the work life. I spent literally seven hours at the Starbucks in Rogers, AR first grading papers, then conquering email, then doing work for the second job in an effort to procrastinate work on school. Today I’m back at Starbucks, right now in hour four, ignoring school work by grading all these essays about home.

I keep thinking about a potential move to Little Rock next year, taking on ATC as a full time job, walking away from the classroom. Arkansas is home. I feel deeply connected to this state, to the values and motives that brought me here. This is home. But in thinking of this move I’ve ignored the equal sense of home I get from walking into my building, into my classroom. I forget that even in that first hellish year I have always always felt home in my classroom. To a shocking degree, I have never been afraid of my space or the students within it. With all the problems in the past four years, I have felt more safe, more protected, and more in control while in my classroom than in any other place– including the home I live in with my teacher roommates. Am I ready to leave that? Or is that the very essence of the problem, the lack of balance I feel in my life? I love teaching, but I don’t want it to be my whole life.

Of my two classes, the very last essay I read was the only one that agreed with me, saying that my classroom is the place she feels most at home:

I love being in a place called home.

The one place I feel at home is at school. It like home you get to have Ms. Lampinen as a teacher to help you like your Mother. She so funny when she dance. I never had a teacher to dance before.

The next reason school it’s like home is because Ms. Lampinen is so nice she helps you with your work like you are at home. She keep making you do it until you get it right. She give you homework to make you a better person.

This place is like a dream house I want to live in. That’s make you a better person and let you be something in life and help you be strong to go out in the world and be something, and I can go back and thank her for that.

That my home where I work. How about you were do you work and call it your home?